› added 11 years ago

88

TIL J.R.R. Tolkien asked his wife to marry him by mail after no communication with her for 5 years, meanwhile she was already engaged to another man.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

l767V TIL attempted suicide was illegal in Britain in the late 19th century. The sentence? Hanging.
VMmYZ TIL an annual celebration held in Yulin, Guangxi, China, by the Chinese during the summer solstice in which festival goers eat dog meat and lychees by boiling them alive, stating the suffering sends adrenaline to the muscles and increases flavor.
RjE1 TIL Fresh snow absorbs sound, lowering ambient noise over a landscape because the trapped air between snowflakes attenuates vibration. That´s why it gets so quite when it snows.
VMLp8 TIL Ella Fitzgerald forgot the lyrics of "Mack The Knife" during a live performance in Berlin. She improvised after the first stanza and won a Grammy for the recording in 1961.
e09QL TIL that Plymouth, England has a 17th century church that was burned out by incendiary bombs in 1941, dedicated as a memorial to civilian deaths instead of being rebuilt, and is currently enclosed within a roundabout on a main road through the city